


Astra Declinant, Non Necessitant (The Stars Dispose, They Do Not Compel)

by Kurukami



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Chess, Childhood, Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-03
Updated: 2014-08-03
Packaged: 2018-02-11 13:01:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2069205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kurukami/pseuds/Kurukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Though our fates may be influenced by the stars we are born beneath, we still all have free will and have the possibility to make our own destinies.  Jane Fosterdóttir may tread a different path here in Asgard, but the traits that led her towards discoveries on Midgard remain just as strong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Astra Declinant, Non Necessitant (The Stars Dispose, They Do Not Compel)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Kingslayer](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2085519) by [audreyii_fic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreyii_fic/pseuds/audreyii_fic). 



> A little while back, I was ooohing and aaaahing over audreyii_fic's "Kingslayer" (previously located in the Jane & Loki Drabbles), wherein Jane ended up in Asgard at the age of 8 through no doing of her own, and was raised beside Thor and Loki as a ward of Queen Frigga. I made an idle comment, based on a segment of the second portion of audreyii_fic's 'verse, that I'd love to see more in the way of Heimdall and Jane bonding.
> 
> She said: you should write that!
> 
> So, uh, I did. Enjoy! :)

† | Sometimes, when she dreams, Jane remembers that night. She had just turned eight, and Papa, smiling, had granted her birthday wish and taken her up for star- and nebula-gazing at the observatory’s 300-cm reflector telescope. The canvas of the sky was so dark up on the mountaintop, far away from the harsh incandescence of the town’s sodium-vapor streetlamps. The stars and the diffuse glow of the Milky Way smeared across the heavens were the only light to be seen by the time they had finished. She remembers bouncing with excitement as she got into the car, images of galaxies and stellar nurseries still glimmering in her head, and her father amiably reminding her to buckle her seatbelt.

Then they were driving, winding their way down the back-and-forth of the mountain road, and Jane leaned against the door, staring up in wonder at the glory of all those luminous faraway pinpricks, the window cold against her cheek. She thought: how far away are they? Can we ever get to them? Papa had explained to her what stars are: boiling spheres of gas burning with thermonuclear fury for billions of years, just like the sun in the clear blue sky, fusing hydrogen to helium and then into other, more exotic matter (or not) depending on how big they were.

(Jane recalls being fascinated when her father explained how a star’s mass would determine just how it would change, too, like there was a magic cosmic Goldilocks switch somewhere that said _this one, too big, this one, too small, this one,_ just _right._ Recalls her wonderment at the thought that if you only knew the numbers, knew the _math_ , you could predict what would happen and when.)

(She wishes that were true of everything.)

She remembers the music on the radio being soft and staticky, this far away from civilization, and then there was a sharp shuddering _crack_ , and a suddenly louder burst of static, and the world seemed to wrench. The car lurched sideways, tires squealing against the blacktop, and Papa was wrestling desperately against the steering wheel and cursing and then—

—then— 

—they went over the cliff’s edge.

The window shattered into a thousand thousand pieces, and they rolled and tumbled and Jane couldn’t look up and see the stars anymore because the sky and the ground were spinning and trading places and Papa was screaming and he sounded more terrified than she could ever remember and then there’s an abrupt, bone-shaking _crunch_ , and the discordant quavering shriek of steel on stone, and they stopped, barely, wavering, precarious, as though gravity, fickle, hadn’t quite made up its mind what to do with them yet. The seatbelt dug a harsh, bruising line across her chest and waist, and Jane looked out the windshield and saw the face of the cliff below her, and Papa wasn’t yelling anymore, and then they tilted forwards with a rasping grind of metal tearing free and Jane drew breath to scream because _it’s too soon, she wanted to see the stars, she wanted to_ understand _the stars_ and

there

was

_**l i g h t .** _

And she, and the car, and Papa, poor Papa, were somewhere else entirely. Within a vast dome, glittering gold, its inner circumference and surface a mosaic of complicated intertwining circles like suns or wagon wheels or enormous clockwork cogs, all woven together in an elegant, eloquent dance she couldn’t yet hope to understand. Her head was afire and spinning, and blackness rose up to claim her like the irresistible waves of a stormy sea sweeping her from clung-to rocks.

Most of the time Jane wakes up, then. After all, that’s where the dream ends. 

That’s where reality begins.

. : . | . : .

† | Queen Frigga is as a mother to her. She’s that to everyone, in spirit and royal authority if not in literal truth, but to Jane (who can scarcely recall her birth-mother’s face) in particular. It was Frigga who doctored the wounds she had sustained in the crash, Frigga who shielded her from the brunt of Odin’s fury, Frigga who gave Jane the stature and position she now possesses. 

But Jane thinks she remembers, as though it were a dream, that it was Heimdall who gently pulled her from the wreckage of the car, who held her and turned her face away from Papa so she didn’t have to see, who summoned the Queen (rather than King Odin) to remedy what had befallen her. She wonders sometimes if it was Heimdall who had pulled the plummeting car from Earth – _Midgard_ , she reminds herself – but how could that be possible?

All that she truly remembers when she’s awake is falling, and light, and then darkness.

Jane still wonders why that happened, occasionally. It’s something she can’t quite comprehend, that _why_. Why had whoever had saved her done so, and why not her father? Why save her at all, why not any of a dozen or a score or a hundred people who might die by accident in a given day? She’s turned the question around in her head a hundred times or more, and still can’t fathom it.

And yet ... among nearly all the Aesir beside Frigga, it is Heimdall who she feels most comfortable around.

She figures that must have something to do with the fact that he, of only a very few of the Aesir, treats her as a person and as a peer – not, as she is too often made aware, some mortal ragamuffin who washed ashore in Asgard who knows how many years ago, someone who should be an object of pity if not disdain. Heimdall takes her as she is, respects her just as she is.

“Knight to F3.”

Which is not to say he doesn’t try to make her do _better,_ though.

“Knight to G4,” Jane says slowly from where she sits, studying the pieces on the board in front of her. The cavernous expanse of the Bifrost observatory looms above them, encircling. There is something about the chamber that she finds comforting, something she can’t quite fit into words. Maybe it’s that this was the first memory she has of Asgard, dimmed though it may be by the passage of time. Or maybe it’s that she takes solace from the predictable motions of the room’s mechanisms, _tick-tick-ticking_ away, just at the edges of her perception, precise and mathematical and reliable. She wonders when, and _how_ , it was first put together. “And… um, what was the question again?”

“Name for me the three categories of nebulae,” he replies, and then, immediately: “Pawn to B5.”

“Absorbtion, reflection, and… emission?” Jane inquires, then moves a smaller piece after a moment’s consideration. “Pawn to G5.”

“Excellent. Pawn from B5 to C6, pawn takes pawn. And the categories of nebulae are differentiated by?”

“Uh.” Heimdall’s not even _looking_ at the board. She tries to puzzle out where his gambit is going, and for time recites from memory. “Absorbtion nebulae, also called dark nebulae, are made of gas and dust in sufficient quantities to obscure the starlight behind them, making observation and measurement of whatever lies beyond them difficult if not impossible. Pawn from B7 to C6, pawn takes pawn.”

“Correct. Knight to E5. And the other two types?”

Jane orders her thoughts while trying to discern the best path through the snarl of pieces on the board. “Reflection nebulae, as their naming might suggest, reflect light from nearby stellar sources. Their spectra are therefore the same as the stars surrounding them, although the light is bluer. Um, pawn from G5 to F4, pawn takes pawn.”

“Why is their light therefore bluer? Knight to C6, knight takes pawn.”

Damn, that puts her queen in jeopardy. She moves it to cover the forward-positioned knight and bishop. “Queen to G5. The light is bluer because shorter wavelengths of energy, light among them, scatter better than longer wavelengths do.”

Heimdall promptly bags the pawn her queen had been guarding and opens up that flank of her defense. “And the third…?”

“Um.” The bishop he used to kill her pawn directly threatens one of her knights, and through _that_ allows the possibility for a threat to her king in a handful of moves unless… “Knight to G6. Emission nebulae themselves emit light at specific wavelengths, with such wavelengths being dependent upon their chemical composition.”

“You have an excellent memory, Lady Jane. Knight to D5.” While she’s chewing over the implications that move puts into place – namely, that now he can move either of his knights into a bishop-supported position to threaten her king and cause a cascading chain of positional sacrifices – he continues. “Now: what are the means by which you may determine your precise position within the Nine Realms?”

She moves her queen to threaten his flank in return before replying, but he blocks her with a guarded pawn. “Planetary geography and climate could narrow down the world, but that would work best on single-biome worlds like Jotunheim. One field of wheat or stand of pine trees looks much like another, after all. Stellar cartography, on the other hand, allows for the possibility of identifying both world-bound position and specific Realm-location.” Irritated, she impulsively takes the pawn with a knight, but …

“Pawn from G3 to H4. Pawn takes knight.” Heimdall offers a ghost of a smile. “What cartographical references would you consult for the most timely identification, then?”

Jane thins her lips and narrows her eyes at him, then captures the pawn with her queen. _That_ opens up his king’s vulnerable flank again, leaving it guarded only by a solitary bishop, a pinned pawn, and a distant rook. “Well, there’s Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi’s _Book of Fixed Stars_ …”

“A reasonably decent primer, but I fear it is hardly an extensive reference.” Heimdall moves one of his knights into place, putting her king in check and threatening a bishop at the same time.

She evades. “King to H8. All right, what about Akadi Ko Eke’s _Treatise Upon Celestial Navigation_?”

Heimdall hums, thoughtful, then uses that knight to whack the bishop who had supported _her_ knight – which, _blast_ , leaves it ideally positioned to capture her queen if she doesn’t move it _now_. “Marginally better. However, Ko Eke’s _Treatise_ is not as well-respected a source as those of either Seshat or Okanogan Vannog.”

Jane frowns at the board, then sees -- _maybe_ \-- a way out. “Queen to H2, check.” 

That places her queen right next to his king, but out of peril because now it’s guarded by _her_ knight and protected on its near flank by a nonthreatening enemy bishop.

“King to F1,” Heimdall replies, without pausing. Which, of course, means that she can’t pursue with her queen or take the bishop, because doing either would leave her queen vulnerable and _aaaargh._

“Rook to E6.” Maybe she could threaten the cluster of knights and the bishop that Heimdall had left parked in the middle of her field of maneuvers. “Would I be able to find the works of Seshat or Okayno – er, Okanonnag—”

“Okanogan. Of the house of Vannog. Queen to B7. And yes, you should be able to find their librams in the libraries of Asgard with sufficient research; unfortunately, there are few who have sought out the knowledge recorded by either in recent years, so they may be a challenge to retrieve.”

Attention split between Heimdall’s move and his recommendation, Jane moves her forward rook to support her knight without consideration, and Heimdall chastises her by taking the _other_ rook and putting her king in check. Then—

“A moment, my Lady,” he murmurs, distracted, and moves towards the center of the spherical chamber.

“Of course. King to H7,” she calls to him, moving the piece out of check. The snap and crackle of energy discharging from capacitors suddenly draws her from her reverie, and she looks up to see Heimdall standing in position atop the control-dais.

“Queen to G8,” comes his preoccupied reply as the mechanisms of the chamber spin and whirl upon one another. She’s never seen this from _inside_ , before. She looks around: the exterior sheathing of the observatory is _rotating_ , faster and faster, the spire of the dome twisting down towards the stars beyond the edge of Asgard’s terrestrial disk. The inner walls are ablaze with glimmering runes, growing in luminosity even as she watches with wide eyes, until their incandescence seems to reach a peak. A surge of prismatic light comes spiraling from the Bifrost’s portal and then, suddenly, a dozen Aesir _thegns_ and more come striding forth with a chained prisoner in their midst. 

Jane pushes herself to her feet to observe. The _thegn_ -warriors appear like most of their kind: toweringly tall (at least to her eyes), encumbered with varied weapons and gleaming armor (in shades which her heraldric instructor would no doubt insist be called _Argent_ and _Or_ and maybe _Gules_ ), and possessed of a swaggering insouciance that seems to be matched only by their confidence. One of them spots her by her game-board, off to one side of the chamber, and, smirking, begins a low-voiced aside to a companion. Jane feels her jaw clench, a tide of displeasure and impotent fury coiling inside her. She knows all too well the sort of not-quite-audible commentary her presence seems to invite, but despite her youth she has every right to be here, just as much as they do. _Every_ right, and—

The _thegn_ ’s companion blanches, throws a quick casual elbow to the speaker’s ribs, and takes his arm with no little urgency. “Come on, Hrolf, best not to say such things.”

She stares after them, frowning, as the band of warriors makes its departure, hastening down the rainbow bridge towards one of the detention-halls. _But why did he—they—_

She turns back towards the chessboard, confused, then — _aha_ — catches sight of Heimdall. The Gatekeeper’s expression at the rapidly retreating squad could conceivably boil water. Jane finds that realization surprisingly heartening, looks down to mask the small smile it brings, and discovers: “Oh. _Oh!_ King to G7. King takes queen.”

Heimdall mock-scowls at her, then moves a knight and puts her king back in check. The next half-dozen moves are a whirlwind of exchanged pieces, and Jane manages to take a rook and hold onto her queen but loses everything else but a handful of pawns. Heimdall, by comparison, ends the exchange in possession of more pawns, a rook, a bishop, _and_ that never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed knight, which leads her to (reluctantly) tip over her king and concede on the 39th move of the game.

“You played well, Lady Jane. I see great promise in you,” Heimdall offers. “I look forward to our next game and our next discussion of knowledge. I recommend you begin to research both the nature and evolution of stars, as well as how their gravitational harmonics and affinities may impact the creation and sustenance of metastable branch-links. Additionally…”

“Yes?”

He looks at her consideringly. “I shall have to see whether I can lay hands upon a set of _pai sho_ tiles before our next meeting. It might benefit you to learn more of subtle long-term strategies.”

“ _Pai sho_?” Jane asks, already taking a mental note.

“Indeed.”

“I thank you for your wisdom, _meistari_. A ten-day, then?”

“I look forward to it.”

. : . | . : .

† | Sitting in her chambers, as shadows trace the day’s illumination inevitably towards twilight, Jane peruses one of the several librams she retrieved from the library. There is so much to learn, to comprehend, to _discover._

She might be small of stature, for now. She might be of Midgard, true; she might never hope to be as strong as Volstagg, or as quick in body as lithe Sif or mocking, agile Fandral. But that doesn’t mean she cannot hope to match them in other arenas. Intelligence and intuition and insight could be just as potent a weapon as any blade, when honed properly. There are things she, Jane, might potentially accomplish that they couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

Jane lets the hint of a smile tug at the edges of her mouth, and turns her attention back towards the words scribed upon the page.

_De omni re scibili et quibusdam allis, scribimus. Entitas ipsa involvit aptitutdinem ad extorquendum cetrum assensum: lapis infinitas…[1]_ 


**Author's Note:**

> The chess moves incorporated within this story are taken from the 1991 match played between Vassily Ivanchuk and Artur Yusupov, reckoned one of the most exciting games ever observed by spectators and judges.
> 
> While writing, both [this image](http://i60.tinypic.com/kf5ag4.jpg) and [this one](http://i57.tinypic.com/e6vxcp.jpg) provided surprising amounts of inspiration.
> 
>  _meistari_ : teacher, from the old Norse
> 
>  _[1]:_ About every knowable thing, and even certain other things, we write. Reality involves a power to compel sure assent: the stones of infinity…


End file.
